The Resurrection Event

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The basic idea of nanotechnology had worked its way well into the culture by what we now know of as the Last Days. So prevalent was the idea of swarms of molecular-level manipulators that, at the time in question, the vast majority of the citizenry thought of the Resurrection Effect as a variety of those nanonetic piezo-machines which, so we thought, would soon be turning our piles of old socks into chocolate.

In fact, the Resurrection Effect operated on the subatomic: a quantum-level self-propagating construct that in effect rewrote the base code of the world. It was designed to target itself upon, incorporate itself within and radically alter the individual, living humanoid form. Its basic nature meant that when released, it proliferated something like a virus but instantly - or at least at the speed of light - resulting in a global saturation in a matter of seconds. The vast majority of our world never even had the luxury of waking up to find it changed.

The initial effects were quite impressive to say the least. The pores of every humanoid body opened like industrial vents and began pumping out a sludge and spray of deconstructed pathogen-components and accumulated toxins. Foreign bodies like artificial hearts, hips or small items lodged in some inextricable location as a child were physically ejected, often at velocities of several thousand metres per second. There were cases, in particularly crowded situations, of some largish bit of matter being fired into someone else, ejected in its turn to hit some other body and the process continuing on for up to an hour.

Old scars and fresh wounds healed themselves in a matter of seconds. Calloused tissue went, too, being the product, effectively, of cumulative minor injury - with the result that fingertips and the soles of feet are as soft and pink as those of a baby. The Resurrection Effect would counter further damage to this otherwise vulnerable new flesh, of course - though unfortunately without suppressing the pain-reflex.

Organ transplants were - and are still - problematic, on the basis that the Resurrection Event is misnomer. It did not and never will resurrect the dead; it merely made and makes the living immortal and invulnerable.

Hearts, livers, lungs and so forth with a dissimilar genetic coding from their hosts were ejected and replaced, but being living humanoid matter in their own right couldn’t die. The ‘homing’ mechanisms of the Event meant that they would gravitate together with the other such items transplanted from the original donor. They are still contained in [CLASSIFICATION ULTIMATE]: piles of living offal, sitting there forlornly and without the ability to regenerate further.

The primary biological transformations that made sexual reproduction obsolete occurred with the same speed as the regeneration of original hearts and lungs and renal systems, with the result that a lot of those actively engaged in copulation at the time ended up being catapulted across the room. Pregnancies spontaneously aborted, the reaction driving several million sudden mothers into the air to bury their heads in any available ceiling.

Fortunately, as coherent living humanoid matter, the offspring came under the remit of the Event and would survive to grow, just as those children whose entrance into the world had been slightly less dramatic.

Twins, though, were and are the worst known cases on record. Or triplets, or quads ... those separate biological entities sharing an entirely similar MetaDNA pattern-signature. With them, the ‘homing’ mechanisms of the Event operated with a vengeance.

Better to forget about those shrieking, boiling, continually exploding and imploding lumps of matter that are the end result of two, or three, or any number of human-sized objects trying to occupy a single humanoid space. Better to forget the fact that, for all of it, they’re still alive.

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In the hysteria directly after Event, there was a brief vogue in artistic circles for the kind of body-modification that might put the Theatre of Mutilation to shame - brief, because the bio-reset mechanisms of the Event made such changes ultimately meaningless. In general life, the world was filled with people jumping off cliffs and buildings, hurling themselves under heavy good vehicles or into the sea, hitting each other with mallets, sledgehammers and axes purely for the sake of it. Those who were naturally inclined to jump in front of heavy goods vehicles in any case soon tired of the sheer futility of it, gradually followed by the rest of the world.

It was this sense of futility, in fact, that proved debilitating. For a time, those with sufficient wealth and resources were able to afford to have their bodies atomised, and those atoms scattered into space to prevent their reunification in anything other than the Big Crunch, but this was merely a palliative measure, failing to address the central problem - that the Resurrection Event was instigated, by whomsoever instigated it, in an unthought-out and ultimately unworkable fashion. It was a classic case of the fact that one must be supremely careful of what one wishes, lest it suddenly and without warning occur.

In the end, the solution lay in one of the simplest concepts of which the mind is capable - that of the fact that anything, literally anything, is all in the mind.

Consciousness is inextricably linked to the fundamental, substructural workings of the universe - the level at which the Resurrection Effect operated itself. In its simplest sense, a schizophrenic might believe that all those around him are alien monsters who have assumed human faces, and this might be true merely for himself - but it is also true in the larger sense. Those he kills, thinking of them as monsters in his delusion, are just as dead as if they actually were.

What we did, in the larger sense, was to convert the delusional into the effectively actual.

Psychodynic generators were seeded through the major population-centres, effectively brainwashing said population so that it fundamentally believed itself Mortal - an inferior underclass born to serve and die and then decompose in the standard pre-Resurrection manner. The fact that their bodies, once buried or cremated or disseminated, were still technically alive was neither here nor there - the subconscious longing for oblivion and respite made it technically true for any individual so mass-processed.

Of course, such an arrangement required administration, and the Administrators (chosen completely at random) were conditioned with a slightly more complex set of delusions. They were the Elite. They were the masters of Time and Space, affecting both and controlling them, affecting and controlling entire worlds and even galaxies, perpetually regenerating themselves. Effectively immortal. Effectively Gods.

Their function required - and still requires - that they believe that they are active, that they have jolly exciting adventures - that they are anything other, ultimately, than a collection of immobile humanoid bodies, their bodies atrophied to the bone, lying on the desiccated surface of a planet that once lived in some real sense and dreaming that they’re still actually alive.

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Occasionally, one or another of them dreams that he or she is accessing a construct called the InfoMatrix, trying to discover some Ultimate Truth about his or her world.